What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?
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I just found another pro / con of Managed (write only) vs Unmanaged (read only). Unmanaged is guaranteed to work with all plugins:
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3331/unable-to-restore-a-wp-site-via-updraftplus
I guess after deciding the way we want to go about listing Wordpress, we'd still want to see if it was easy to make big WP plugins working in Cloudron. I could look at these on a case by case basis when people post in the forums. Or, we could take the approach of, "if you want a plugin that requires read access, blah blah blah."
So during installation we may want to mention that the "Developer Edition" is more compatible with plugins.
@Lonk IMHO there's plugins that should be publicly outed for crimes against sensibility - starting with any that try to write to their own directory instead of
wp-contentsub-dirs.Still yet to test them both but I trust file permissions more than I trust wp plugins that don't respect security. No plugin has any business writing files as it pleases that could be executables.
I don't want all plugins to work - just the ones that respect WP standards, practices, file structure and security.
// end of rant
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@Lonk IMHO there's plugins that should be publicly outed for crimes against sensibility - starting with any that try to write to their own directory instead of
wp-contentsub-dirs.Still yet to test them both but I trust file permissions more than I trust wp plugins that don't respect security. No plugin has any business writing files as it pleases that could be executables.
I don't want all plugins to work - just the ones that respect WP standards, practices, file structure and security.
// end of rant
@marcusquinn I agree and would argue the best of both worlds is protected app/code but with only wp-config.php access, .htaccess access, and wp-content write access. This is to make sure Wordpress itself isn't changed but you can change the only files you need as necessary (I say that as a developer, you should never touch anything upstream from
wp-contentexcept forwp-configand.htaccess. It'd be cool if we had the ability to merge the best of these two world. Making it as secure as possible, but as compatible and developer friendly as possible. -
@marcusquinn I agree and would argue the best of both worlds is protected app/code but with only wp-config.php access, .htaccess access, and wp-content write access. This is to make sure Wordpress itself isn't changed but you can change the only files you need as necessary (I say that as a developer, you should never touch anything upstream from
wp-contentexcept forwp-configand.htaccess. It'd be cool if we had the ability to merge the best of these two world. Making it as secure as possible, but as compatible and developer friendly as possible.@Lonk I'll DM you to review our scripts for this...
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Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app? It'd be more configuration at first in the LAMP app, that's about all I can think of. Am I maybe missing something?
I did a test today and deployed WordPress in a LAMP app, and it did really well after tweaking some things in wp-config.php and adding in the WP Mail SMTP plugin and modifying it's wp_mail_smtp.php file. The tweaks of course were just using the getenv() PHP variables setup from credentials.txt in the LAMP app, which makes it dynamic so I could setup a template WordPress and copy from there to a different domain without needing to manually setup a bunch of stuff.
This makes me wonder... wouldn't one approach (and I had sort of suggested this earlier in this thread too) be to just publish/manage the Managed one, and those of us who want to use the Unmanaged version can effectively just deploy it in a LAMP stack? Of course, no matter what I still lose LDAP which I hope to see resolved in the future for either the Unmanaged app or LAMP app, but that won't impact the WordPress app either way anyways no matter what the deployment is.
Seems to me Cloudron could just stick to the managed apps (since every other app is managed anyways) and those who want to deviate from that can use the LAMP stack instead, as I was able to do today in a test.
Maybe I'm missing something though?
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Dustin Dauncey
www.d19.ca -
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app? It'd be more configuration at first in the LAMP app, that's about all I can think of. Am I maybe missing something?
I did a test today and deployed WordPress in a LAMP app, and it did really well after tweaking some things in wp-config.php and adding in the WP Mail SMTP plugin and modifying it's wp_mail_smtp.php file. The tweaks of course were just using the getenv() PHP variables setup from credentials.txt in the LAMP app, which makes it dynamic so I could setup a template WordPress and copy from there to a different domain without needing to manually setup a bunch of stuff.
This makes me wonder... wouldn't one approach (and I had sort of suggested this earlier in this thread too) be to just publish/manage the Managed one, and those of us who want to use the Unmanaged version can effectively just deploy it in a LAMP stack? Of course, no matter what I still lose LDAP which I hope to see resolved in the future for either the Unmanaged app or LAMP app, but that won't impact the WordPress app either way anyways no matter what the deployment is.
Seems to me Cloudron could just stick to the managed apps (since every other app is managed anyways) and those who want to deviate from that can use the LAMP stack instead, as I was able to do today in a test.
Maybe I'm missing something though?
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@d19dotca I just see it as a duplication of the M from LAMP.
Not sure if the Mysql DB from WP Unmanaged is independent or using the shared Cloudron one.
@robi said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
Not sure if the Mysql DB from WP Unmanaged is independent or using the shared Cloudron one.
It’s using the Cloudron MySQL server, same as all the other apps. It’s shared, not independent, but of course unique databases within MySQL. No duplication exists from what I can tell.
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Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app? It'd be more configuration at first in the LAMP app, that's about all I can think of. Am I maybe missing something?
I did a test today and deployed WordPress in a LAMP app, and it did really well after tweaking some things in wp-config.php and adding in the WP Mail SMTP plugin and modifying it's wp_mail_smtp.php file. The tweaks of course were just using the getenv() PHP variables setup from credentials.txt in the LAMP app, which makes it dynamic so I could setup a template WordPress and copy from there to a different domain without needing to manually setup a bunch of stuff.
This makes me wonder... wouldn't one approach (and I had sort of suggested this earlier in this thread too) be to just publish/manage the Managed one, and those of us who want to use the Unmanaged version can effectively just deploy it in a LAMP stack? Of course, no matter what I still lose LDAP which I hope to see resolved in the future for either the Unmanaged app or LAMP app, but that won't impact the WordPress app either way anyways no matter what the deployment is.
Seems to me Cloudron could just stick to the managed apps (since every other app is managed anyways) and those who want to deviate from that can use the LAMP stack instead, as I was able to do today in a test.
Maybe I'm missing something though?
@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
This makes me wonder... wouldn't one approach (and I had sort of suggested this earlier in this thread too) be to just publish/manage the Managed one, and those of us who want to use the Unmanaged version can effectively just deploy it in a LAMP stack?
That would be one approach, but I still prefer to not have to manually install on the LAMP. However easy it might be, I'm not actually sure how exactly to do it!
And given the popularity of WordPress it'd be mad to not keep installing WordPress as easy as possible.
Personally I think the best route it to ditch the Managed app and to just rename Unmanaged as simply WordPress.
Of course the downside is then we'd loose LDAP.
But given Managed doesn't seem to auto-update (nor updates plugins and themes and hence actually requires just as much - or even more - manual maintenance as Unmanaged) and can't run all plugins etc, I still don't really see the point of Managed (aside from LDAP).
But of course there'll likely be others who do really want to keep Managed and so we're back where we are
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Our Brandlight team has started work on moving our WP sites to a Cloudron instance this week. You'll have many WP optimisation experienced devs on this, so we'll bring back our conclusions and optimisations soon. Watch this space
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https://brandlight.org/ is now running on Hetzner + Cloudron + Wordpress (Unmanaged).
More feedback to follow. Our first challenge is the domain aliases we have for other multi-region / multilingual websites.
Cloudron & WP Apps are about to get a lot more attention from our devs
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Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app? It'd be more configuration at first in the LAMP app, that's about all I can think of. Am I maybe missing something?
I did a test today and deployed WordPress in a LAMP app, and it did really well after tweaking some things in wp-config.php and adding in the WP Mail SMTP plugin and modifying it's wp_mail_smtp.php file. The tweaks of course were just using the getenv() PHP variables setup from credentials.txt in the LAMP app, which makes it dynamic so I could setup a template WordPress and copy from there to a different domain without needing to manually setup a bunch of stuff.
This makes me wonder... wouldn't one approach (and I had sort of suggested this earlier in this thread too) be to just publish/manage the Managed one, and those of us who want to use the Unmanaged version can effectively just deploy it in a LAMP stack? Of course, no matter what I still lose LDAP which I hope to see resolved in the future for either the Unmanaged app or LAMP app, but that won't impact the WordPress app either way anyways no matter what the deployment is.
Seems to me Cloudron could just stick to the managed apps (since every other app is managed anyways) and those who want to deviate from that can use the LAMP stack instead, as I was able to do today in a test.
Maybe I'm missing something though?
@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app?
Until 2-3 releases ago, the main way to get "code" into the LAMP stack was via SFTP (i.e no file manager). We used to get like one support request everyday asking how to install WordPress into LAMP stack because SFTP will fail in many ways (you have to open port 222, people forget sftp:// in filezilla, cloudron SFTP username has two "@" and is sometimes is rejected by clients etc). Our solution was to make a LAMP stack with WP pre-installed, which is essentially Unmanaged WordPress
The other thing Unmanaged WP app has is the WP CLI. It's very useful for automation.
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Cool - WP CLI is essential for us - good to know.
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@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app?
Until 2-3 releases ago, the main way to get "code" into the LAMP stack was via SFTP (i.e no file manager). We used to get like one support request everyday asking how to install WordPress into LAMP stack because SFTP will fail in many ways (you have to open port 222, people forget sftp:// in filezilla, cloudron SFTP username has two "@" and is sometimes is rejected by clients etc). Our solution was to make a LAMP stack with WP pre-installed, which is essentially Unmanaged WordPress
The other thing Unmanaged WP app has is the WP CLI. It's very useful for automation.
@girish All of this is achievable in LAMP app today though, right? I was able to make a pretty good WordPress install in LAMP yesterday that I could clone from to new domains and it all updated accordingly, mail would send, etc. Just makes me wonder if it's something we can just have those interested in an unmanaged WP do just to keep things "clean" on Cloudron. But maybe that's not desirable by the community, in which is that's fine, just thought I'd suggest it after having tried it with success.
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Dustin Dauncey
www.d19.ca -
@girish All of this is achievable in LAMP app today though, right? I was able to make a pretty good WordPress install in LAMP yesterday that I could clone from to new domains and it all updated accordingly, mail would send, etc. Just makes me wonder if it's something we can just have those interested in an unmanaged WP do just to keep things "clean" on Cloudron. But maybe that's not desirable by the community, in which is that's fine, just thought I'd suggest it after having tried it with success.
@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
@girish All of this is achievable in LAMP app today though, right?
Yes, that's correct. Many our LAMP apps are also the same btw, it's not specific to WordPress
For example, say shaarli, invoice ninja, mediawiki, moodle etc. One can just spin up a LAMP stack and install them. It's just a lot of error prone work. As an example, one has to also setup cron jobs in LAMP stack (did you remember to do that for WP?). So, I would say, the benefit is that by specializing packages, you get some of this learnt knowledge automated. -
@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app?
Until 2-3 releases ago, the main way to get "code" into the LAMP stack was via SFTP (i.e no file manager). We used to get like one support request everyday asking how to install WordPress into LAMP stack because SFTP will fail in many ways (you have to open port 222, people forget sftp:// in filezilla, cloudron SFTP username has two "@" and is sometimes is rejected by clients etc). Our solution was to make a LAMP stack with WP pre-installed, which is essentially Unmanaged WordPress
The other thing Unmanaged WP app has is the WP CLI. It's very useful for automation.
@girish said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between WordPress Unmanaged and just installing WordPress inside of the LAMP app?
Until 2-3 releases ago, the main way to get "code" into the LAMP stack was via SFTP (i.e no file manager). We used to get like one support request everyday asking how to install WordPress into LAMP stack because SFTP will fail in many ways (you have to open port 222, people forget sftp:// in filezilla, cloudron SFTP username has two "@" and is sometimes is rejected by clients etc). Our solution was to make a LAMP stack with WP pre-installed, which is essentially Unmanaged WordPress
The other thing Unmanaged WP app has is the WP CLI. It's very useful for automation.
You’re forgetting the minutely Docker cron that you spawn whilst disabling WP’s built in WP-Cron (for good reason, it’s unreliable).
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@d19dotca said in What is the point of WordPress (Managed)?:
@girish All of this is achievable in LAMP app today though, right?
Yes, that's correct. Many our LAMP apps are also the same btw, it's not specific to WordPress
For example, say shaarli, invoice ninja, mediawiki, moodle etc. One can just spin up a LAMP stack and install them. It's just a lot of error prone work. As an example, one has to also setup cron jobs in LAMP stack (did you remember to do that for WP?). So, I would say, the benefit is that by specializing packages, you get some of this learnt knowledge automated.@girish That's fair, good point. It's good knowing I can at least run them all in LAMP though if I needed to, my test last night was really just me seeing if I could do it all on my own, haha, then it got me thinking more about the difference between the two.
Curious... any ETA on when the Unmanaged once will come with LDAP? I think that's a highly requested feature for a while now. I know you mentioned before there was a reason to not include it with LDAP when it already had SFTP, but unsure if that's still a current vulnerability or not. If it helps, I could try making the changes needed to implement LDAP by forking the repository if that helps at all.
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Dustin Dauncey
www.d19.ca -
@girish That's fair, good point. It's good knowing I can at least run them all in LAMP though if I needed to, my test last night was really just me seeing if I could do it all on my own, haha, then it got me thinking more about the difference between the two.
Curious... any ETA on when the Unmanaged once will come with LDAP? I think that's a highly requested feature for a while now. I know you mentioned before there was a reason to not include it with LDAP when it already had SFTP, but unsure if that's still a current vulnerability or not. If it helps, I could try making the changes needed to implement LDAP by forking the repository if that helps at all.
@d19dotca We'll be needing to solve this LDAP connection need too.
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I can help with LDAP integration if the devs need help figuring out an implementation. Just wanted to throw my offer out there if it helps other's get up and running on Cloudron faster.
️@Lonk Cool - I feel a new Wordpress (Hyper Edition) coming on
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I tried to make a conclusion here - https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3488/changes-to-wordpress-apps . Thanks for all the suggestion guys!
